Naked Emperor News has compiled what has to be one of the most hearty meals of crow that the Dems are going to have to eat right now, as they all continue to babble on about using the “nuclear option” to ram their corpulent health care obscenity through Congress.

This beautiful compilation includes an all-star cast of Obama, Biden, Reid, Clinton, Feinberg, Schumer, Dodd, and more, all of whose words are now coming back to bite them in the ass, as they once attacked the Republicans for considering the option (which the Republicans never ultimately utilized).

How about Biden telling Republicans at the time: I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.

Or Obama: He [Bush] hasn’t gotten his way, and that is now prompting, you know, a change in the Senate rules that really I think will change the character of the Senate forever… That’s just not what the founders intended!

Or Hillary Clinton: So this president [Bush] has come to the majority here in the Senate and basically said, “Change the rules! Do it the way I want it done!” And I guess there just weren’t very many voices on the other side of the aisle that acted the way previous generations of senators have acted and said, “Mr. President, we’re with you! We support you! But, that’s a bridge too far. We can’t go there. You have to restrain yourself Mr. President!”

Or Schumer: We are on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis… the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances which say that if you get 51% of the vote, you don’t get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it’s almost a temper tantrum… They want their way every single time, and they will change the rules, break the rules, misread the Constitution… so that they will get their way.

The most incredible part about this is that these shameless self-righteous blowhards probably don’t even realize how ridiculously hypocritical and idiotic they sound!

These brazen crooks should all be thrown out on their asses, and replaced with people who have actual integrity and honesty. How long are we going to put it with sanctimonious, pompous phonies like this???

Enjoy this hilarious video and pass it along so that everyone can enjoy it to the fullest!

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton absolutely lost it today when a Congolese student asked her what Obama thought about a Chinese trade deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Unfortunately for the student, the interpreter mistakenly substituted “Mr. Clinton” for “Mr. Obama”, resulting in the question seeming to ask for Bill’s opinion on the trade deal, which pushed Hillary over the edge, getting her to lash out, saying, “Wait!  You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?  My husband is not secretary of state, I am. So you ask my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.“

Jackson Diehl, the Deputy Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post—and not exactly a close friend of Israel, wrote a great editorial in Monday’s Post urging Obama to “end the spat with Israel”.

The situation is one in which Obama is painting himself into a corner with his anti-settlement rhetoric, and the more adamant his position becomes the tougher it’ll be for him later when he tries to extricate himself from those positions.

(Of course, he may not have any interest in ever extricating himself from those positions, in which case we can kiss any good relationship with Israel goodbye.)

The reason for this is that Israel cannot and will not ever budge from natural growth in some of the settlements. If they were to follow Obama’s demands to the letter, that would mean they cannot even renovate a home in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem!

This position is therefore one which will never be supported by enough Israeli cabinet members or members of the knesset to make a difference. And, by making his demands more than once—personally, as well as through other members of his administration, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—he is putting himself in a position to either look weak later by backpedaling on those demands or to reneg on his campaign promises—not to mention change the course of a long history of U.S.-Israeli relations—and sever ties with Israel.

Another compelling reason that Diehl makes for Obama to quickly end this showdown is that it basically gives the Palestinians yet another “free pass” to sit back and do nothing. As long as they’re watching the “U.S. versus Israel” showdown, they can continue to breach every agreement as they’ve been doing all along, but now with a new excuse in their arsenal: “we’re not stopping terrorism because we’re still waiting for Israel to stop building” (as though there is even any moral equivalence… but that’s another whole issue…).

It should be very interesting to see how this ends…

Seventeenth century English politician Algernon Sydney said that “liars need to have good memories.”  Well, the folks at the New York Times should learn a lesson from that because they spend so much time spinning (and outright lying), that they sometimes lose track of their “facts” in the stories they spin.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal gives us a great illustration of this in yesterday’s NY Times, in an article about the settlements. In the article, the Times insinuates, similar to Hillary Clinton’s recent pack of lies, that the Israelis made up the whole idea of previous agreements with the United States supporting limited construction in settlements, and that the understanding is in fact that there is to be no construction in the settlements. The NY Times writes:

Such a demand is part of the “road map” agreed to by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, the so-called quartet, and signed by Israel. But the Israelis said they had unwritten agreements with the former Bush administration that defined the freeze more narrowly, as not building new settlements or expropriating more land.

Well, back in 2004 (August 21, 2004, to be exact), when it was convenient for the NY Times to bash President Bush to its liberal readers, they boldly wrote an article on the settlements containing the following:

The Bush administration, moving to lend political support to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at a time of political turmoil, has modified its policy and signaled approval of growth in at least some Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, American and Israeli officials say.

In the latest modification of American policy, the administration now supports construction of new apartments in areas already built up in some settlements, as long as the expansion does not extend outward to undeveloped parts of the West Bank, according to the officials.

Kudos to James Taranto for putting those together, and, as usual, shame on the NY Times for it’s continued lies, spin, and partisan politics creeping into virtually every article they write.

Elliot Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a U.S. official who handled Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2009, has written a forceful op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on the agreement between the United States and Israel on the issue of the settlements and natural growth.

We’ve all heard in recent weeks from the current administration’s talking heads that, despite popular belief, there supposedly was never any agreement between the U.S. and Israel on the issue of natural growth. This chatter arose from Obama’s recent hardline attitude toward Israel and his demands that Israel cease all settlement activity, including natural growth.

When Arial Sharon, one of Israel’s most hawkish prime ministers at the time, made history by announcing his acceptance of a future Palestinian state and his plan for complete disengagement from Gaza, including uprooting and displacing thousands of Israeli residents, it wasn’t because he woke up one day with a reckless itch that needed scratching.  It was entirely the result of strong promises and assurances by President Bush that his doing so would result in the backing of the U.S. on certain issues.

One of those issues was natural growth in existing settlements. As Elliot Abrams—a man on the inside of these talks—attests, the U.S. agreed to allow natural growth as long as they adhered to a few conditions, including taking no additional land for such growth and pulling out of Gaza and a few West Bank settlements.

Israel’s acquiescense in this disengagement and displacement hinged entirely on these promises. For the current administration to “undo” these assurances, knowing that Israel cannot “undo” their disengagement and displacement, is one of Obama’s most backstabbing betrayals yet, and a testament to his utter lack of integrity.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been at the forefront defending Obama’s hardline tactics, claiming that there was never any such understanding or assurances, but Elliot Abrams went out of his way to lay out the entire sequence of events and understandings in his WSJ piece.  I strongly encourage everyone to read it.

Here is an excerpt from it, which I think is the main essence of it:

On the major settlement blocs, Mr. Bush said, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” Several previous administrations had declared all Israeli settlements beyond the “1967 borders” to be illegal. Here Mr. Bush dropped such language, referring to the 1967 borders — correctly — as merely the lines where the fighting stopped in 1949, and saying that in any realistic peace agreement Israel would be able to negotiate keeping those major settlements.

On settlements we also agreed on principles that would permit some continuing growth. Mr. Sharon stated these clearly in a major policy speech in December 2003: “Israel will meet all its obligations with regard to construction in the settlements. There will be no construction beyond the existing construction line, no expropriation of land for construction, no special economic incentives and no construction of new settlements.”

Ariel Sharon did not invent those four principles. They emerged from discussions with American officials and were discussed by Messrs. Sharon and Bush at their Aqaba meeting in June 2003.

They were not secret, either. Four days after the president’s letter, Mr. Sharon’s Chief of Staff Dov Weissglas wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “I wish to reconfirm the following understanding, which had been reached between us: 1. Restrictions on settlement growth: within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria.”

Stories in the press also made it clear that there were indeed “agreed principles.” On Aug. 21, 2004 the New York Times reported that “the Bush administration . . . now supports construction of new apartments in areas already built up in some settlements, as long as the expansion does not extend outward.”

In recent weeks, American officials have denied that any agreement on settlements existed. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated on June 17 that “in looking at the history of the Bush administration, there were no informal or oral enforceable agreements. That has been verified by the official record of the administration and by the personnel in the positions of responsibility.”

These statements are incorrect. Not only were there agreements, but the prime minister of Israel relied on them in undertaking a wrenching political reorientation — the dissolution of his government, the removal of every single Israeli citizen, settlement and military position in Gaza, and the removal of four small settlements in the West Bank. This was the first time Israel had ever removed settlements outside the context of a peace treaty, and it was a major step.